We Have A Severe Problem With Email. Here's How To Fix It.

We read, send, and receive too many work emails after-hours. The vast majority of them can wait until the following business day. We need a system to regain our sanity and weed out everything but emergencies. Here it is.

A personal email account is one of the best and most calming inventions of the past 50 years. Email in 2014 is intrinsic to who we are, and it's as vital as a phone number or a physical address. In some cases, it's more important than those two things, seeing as email is often our most practical and reliable lifeline when traveling. A phone call connects you to one person or a small group; email connects you to memories, documents, reservations, confirmation numbers, and anything else that can be conveniently sucked into the black hole of "data." Email will never go away. Long live email.

A personal email account can be revelatory and freeing. A professional email account, or work email, cannot. Work email, the new white collar enemy du jour, is a time-suck, a productivity killer, a distraction, a spam-magnet, a platform for getting oneself fired, a pissing contest. Work email is anxiety-inducing. Colleges offer instruction on how to write work email! (That's why we pay 'em the big bucks.) Intra-office messenging systems like Slack, Skype, and HipChat can help alleviate some of the burden, but only during working hours. The worst part about work email is its power over one's non-working hours, weekends, holidays, romantic evenings, and vacations. After-hours work email is a monkey on your back, an addiction you can't quite shake. After-hours work email is shame. After-hours work email, more than anything, is fear.

Separate from the pressures of a global economy, the impulse to log on at night seems, to me, purely domestic. I'm the one telling myself that the work is going to be there in the morning, so why not start whittling it down tonight? There's also the social signal sent by a late-night email. After a certain hour, I'm not just sending a message; I'm also sending a message. Responding to somebody 24 hours late suggests a lack of diligence. Responding to that person around midnight takes the same amount of procrastination, but disguises it as industriousness: "Oh, hey, see that 1:04 AM timestamp? I guess I'm just that busy! (yet dedicated!)."

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And Friday morning, the Op-Ed page of The New York Times tackled the subject, with a focus on German automaker Daimler:

Daimler, the German automaker, has given new meaning to the escape command on workers' computers this summer by instituting an automatic program to delete incoming emails to employees on vacation, so they are not tempted to peek at business traffic at the seashore and can start with a clean slate when they return to work.

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The idea is to encourage a healthier balance in life and to cut down on workers' burnout — a condition that Daimler has concluded can't be good for business in the long run. The program, called Mail on Holiday, politely informs senders that their messages were instantly deleted, but they can contact a designated alternate worker if necessary. The email blackout is optional for the company's 100,000 workers, but "the response is basically 99 percent positive," a Daimler spokesman, Oliver Wihofszki, told BBC Radio.

While the "out of sight/out of mind" approach of Daimler is enticing upon first glance, it doesn't change the fact that vital emails may be automatically deleted before an employee gets a chance to deem them readable "now" or "later." Regardless of perceived convenience, employees need autonomy in their decision-making and priotization of tasks.

In most major U.S. cities, the average white collar work day broke the 9-to-5 mold two decades ago. Many companies now start their business days at 10 a.m. or later, while many popular websites employ overnight editors and expect "regular" employees to spend 1-to-3 hours working at home from 6 a.m. (or earlier). It's rare to find a white collar worker who leaves the office before 5:30 p.m., nay 6, with many sticking around until 7 or 8.

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Okay, nothing about this is revolutionary. Post-college bankers routinely clock 100 hour weeks with little or no weekends. Certain sects of lawyers and doctors are not far behind. But after-hours work email, particularly when available through a smartphone, has stretched the idea of a "long day" into an endless one.

Even if we're able to leave the office at a reasonable hour and make it home in time for a shared meal with family members, the monkey is there, clawing at our collective back to check our work email just in case something happened.

The answer, then, is simple. White collar offices should start enacting daily cut-off times for expectations of emails checked/read/sent, and start texting employees only if and when something happens. The idea of a 5 p.m. hard stop is romantic, though impractical, particularly with many companies staffing cross-time-zone teams.

But what if a New York office ceased major correspondence from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. ET? Twelve hours "free" doesn't sound like much, but it's more than many employees have right now. As for jobs that depend on the "24/7 news cycle"? Bosses and colleagues could start adhering to the 7 p.m. threshold, and only breaking it in times of (worthy) breaking news. And when that time comes, it wouldn't be a call, or an email, but a simple text message. (And never a group text, lest it become email with a harder keyboard.)

Many employees already text or G-chat with their direct supervisors. For those who don't, it's not that weird. Really! Sure, getting a once-in-a-blue-moon text at midnight on a Tuesday from the person who writes your performance review may induce a level of anxiety. But if you left work at 7 p.m. that night, you would have had five hours of pure, utter, stress-free calm and freedom until that text happened to arrive (which, hopefully, would be less than once a month). You could once again go out to eat without secretly checking work email in the bathroom. You could escape into a cable TV drama without the soft white glow of an inbox under your thumb. You could be a little more mindful, if only for a handful of hours.

White collar workers may never reach another point of true on-the-clock/off-the-clock separation. But the least we can do is end the act of checking email out of fear. Because an after-hours email check, like most fears, is, more often than not, an act of searching for something that's not there. And when it is there, it's not as powerful as you make it out to be.

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